The rice cake is the most honest thing the low-fat era ever produced, because it tasted exactly as joyless as the philosophy that made it. Picture the wretched thing. A pale, crunchy disc of puffed rice, near enough the texture and flavour of expanded polystyrene, sold to grown adults as a snack. You bit in and it shattered into a thousand styrofoam shards that stuck to the roof of your mouth and delivered, in return, the taste of absolutely nothing. It was the sound of dieting itself. A dry, hollow crunch echoing across an open-plan office at three in the afternoon, the unmistakable noise of a human being quietly punishing themselves at their own desk. They were adored because they were almost fat-free and very low in calories, and in the arithmetic of the time that made them practically a tonic. You ate one and felt you had been good. The trouble was that one satisfied nobody, so you ate four, and then you smeared something on them to make them bearable, and the something was a fat-free spread that was mostly sugar, and round and round you went. Worse still, the puffed rice behaved in the body almost exactly like sugar. Straight to the top of the glycaemic index, a clean spike of blood sugar followed by the crash that had you reaching for the next disc. The virtuous diet snack of the decade was, underneath the costume, a packet of sweets in beige. And the food that would actually have saved you sat in the fridge, accused of a crime it never committed. Two eggs cooked in butter would have filled you, steadied you for hours, and tasted of something a person could love. But the eggs carried cholesterol and the butter carried fat, and so a nation chose instead to gnaw polystyrene at its desk and call the suffering discipline. We were not getting healthier. We were getting hungrier, and lonelier, one hollow crunch at a time.

UFC Freedom 250 is facing a chaotic weather setup on the White House South Lawn, with a 60% chance of thunderstorms, heavy downpours, and wind gusts up to 34 mph threatening to delay the outdoor fights. On top of the storm risk, brutal D.C. humidity is driving a triple-digit heat index alongside massive swarms of mosquitos and gnats that fighters will have to battle inside the cage. While the venue’s massive 92-foot overhang will keep the octagon dry, a single lightning strike within eight miles will trigger an automatic 30-minute freeze on the entire event.